“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the remaining wild species into zoos or extinction; if we pollute the last clean air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence….

We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to it’s edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, part of the geography of hope.”

-Wallace Stegner, 1960